Chapter 410: THE CAPITAL OF SWARNABHUMI

Whatever had brushed against him at the walls didn’t return. Rama waited for it through the entire approach, that same slow vastness he half-expected to flare again the closer they came, and it simply didn’t, subsiding back into whatever distance it had reached out from in the first place. He filed it beside everything else waiting for later examination and let the gates take his full attention instead, because there was no time left for anything else.

The gates themselves stood twice the height of any structure Tirtayasa had ever built, timber reinforced with iron bands, guards posted in numbers that made the border patrol’s six spears look almost casual by comparison. Beyond them, the city opened outward in a way that made their daughter go rigid with wonder against Rama’s back.

"Papa," she breathed. "Papa."

He didn’t blame her. Nothing in seven weeks at Tirtayasa had prepared any of them for this.

Stone buildings rose two and three stories in tight, ordered rows, streets wide enough for carts to pass each other without slowing, water channels running alongside the main thoroughfare with a precision that told Rama someone had engineered this city’s plumbing generations before anyone in his own century had thought to romanticize the achievement. Markets sprawled across open squares, vendors calling prices, the specific controlled chaos of genuine commerce rather than the small, familiar trading Tirtayasa’s well had ever seen.

Sekar’s attention moved everywhere at once, cataloguing with the same hungry precision she’d brought to every new discovery since the observatory deck fell apart. "Look at the water system," she murmured, mostly to herself. "That’s not primitive engineering. That’s centuries of accumulated civil planning."

"You sound impressed."

"I am impressed. I keep expecting this world to be smaller than it actually is, and it keeps proving me wrong."

Their daughter, meanwhile, had stopped trying to take everything in with words at all, simply pointing — at a merchant’s stall stacked with fruit she didn’t recognize, at a group of children her own age chasing something through the crowd, at a temple gate carved with figures too intricate for her small fingers to trace from this distance though she tried anyway, hand extended toward the passing scene.

"Can we go see that?" she asked, pointing toward a fountain where a crowd had gathered around some kind of performer.

"Not today," Sekar said gently. "Maybe after."

"Promise?"

"I promise we’ll try."

The crowd noticed them the way any crowd noticed the unfamiliar — glances first, then lingering attention, then, gradually, the specific hush that spread outward from people close enough to recognize the royal escort’s colors and understand these particular strangers mattered enough to warrant six armed riders.

A woman selling woven cloth stopped mid-sentence to stare. Two boys broke off their game to trail alongside the procession for half a block before a parent called them back. An old man leaning in a doorway watched with an expression Rama couldn’t fully read, something between curiosity and unease, tracking their daughter specifically with a focus that made Rama’s protective instinct sharpen briefly before the man simply looked away again, apparently satisfied by whatever he’d been checking for.

"They’re not scared," their daughter observed, echoing almost exactly what she’d said back in Tirtayasa after the raid. "Just curious."

"Just curious," Rama agreed, though he kept his own attention moving across the crowd anyway, seven years of institutional habit refusing to fully relax even here, even now, surrounded by six royal escorts and a city too populated for any single threat to reach them easily.

The palace grounds announced themselves before the palace itself came into view — walls within walls, a second gate considerably more heavily guarded than the city’s outer entrance, gardens visible through iron grating where fountains caught the afternoon light. Yudhistira dismounted at this second gate and spoke briefly with the guards stationed there, and something in the exchange’s tone shifted from routine to formal within seconds.

Rama caught only fragments, but Sekar’s expression, listening properly, told him the rest before she’d translated a word of it.

"What," he said quietly.

"They’re not taking us to court officials first," she said, her voice carrying a specific, controlled tension he recognized from every genuinely significant briefing across seven years of institutional crisis. "Yudhistira just told the gate guard our arrival was expected directly by the king."

"Directly."

"His Majesty requested to be informed the moment we arrived. Not tomorrow, not after the usual formal assessment. Today." She glanced at their daughter, still perched on Rama’s shoulders, still taking in the palace grounds with wide, unbothered wonder, entirely unaware of what her parents had just learned. "We’re not meeting a council first, Rama. We’re meeting King Ardhana himself, this afternoon, considerably sooner than either of us prepared for."

Yudhistira returned to them with an expression that mixed genuine deference with something Rama read as mild personal surprise — a soldier who’d clearly expected the usual bureaucratic delay and found himself instead delivering news he hadn’t anticipated needing to deliver.

"His Majesty has been informed of your arrival," he said, through Sekar’s steady translation. "He wishes to receive you directly. Now, while the light is good and the court is already assembled for afternoon business."

"That seems considerably faster than protocol usually allows," Sekar said carefully, testing the observation rather than stating it as accusation.

Yudhistira’s expression carried the specific discomfort of a man who agreed but wasn’t in a position to say so plainly. "His Majesty has taken particular interest in your account," he said instead. "More particular, I think, than most reports of this kind receive."

Rama felt their daughter shift slightly against his shoulders, some of her wonder finally giving way to the beginnings of nerves, small hands tightening in his hair.

"It’s going to be fine," he told her quietly, hoping the words carried more certainty than he actually possessed.

"Promise?" she asked, the same word she’d used about the fountain, the same word she’d used with Wayan at the village gate, small and hopeful and trusting in exactly the way that made every promise he offered her feel considerably heavier than it should.

He didn’t answer immediately. Sekar’s hand found his free one, steadying, and the palace gates swung open ahead of them before he had to decide what honest reassurance actually sounded like.